Who Gets Ahead? Cross-country Evidence on Intragenerational Income Mobility from Administrative Records

Working Paper 2026-698

Abstract

Income mobility is often invoked as a counterweight to slow income growth and high inequality, yet conclusions on who benefits from mobility depend on the part of the income distribution examined and the metric used. Drawing on harmonised administrative records from Austria, Belgium, Estonia and Spain, we combine relative and absolute mobility metrics to study disposable income dynamics for working-age individuals along the distribution between 2017 and 2022. Those at the bottom experience markedly different income growth across countries, while those at the top experience homogeneous declines. Rank persistence varies substantially across countries, from 0.64 in Estonia to 0.79 in Spain, but top incomes are highly persistent everywhere, largely insulated from country-specific mobility dynamics. Mobility gaps by age, gender, education and place of residence also change in sign and magnitude depending on people’s starting point in the distribution. We show that different metrics can give conflicting assessments of where mobility is more favourable for those at the bottom, and that these differences are largely explained by countries’ levels of inequality and aggregate income growth: more unequal or higher-growth countries need more progressive income growth to deliver comparable positional mobility and narrowing of absolute income gaps.

Authors: Sebastian Koenigs, Javier Terrero-Davila.